Garden 2009: Garlic Planting

In the garden over the past several days:

GARLIC:  Jo planted garlic. Her technique is to use a spacing board and lay out all the cloves. Then, she uses the trowel to plant each clove. There's only one problem with this technique: Canine garden buddies. When Jo's back was turned, the dogs kept stealing garlic cloves. The didn't eat the garlic, just carried it off and played with it.

Here in the south, garlic is planted in late summer. It sprouts and the plants grow to a modest size before winter when they go dormant. As soon as the weather warms up in the spring, the garlic begins growing again. It's dug in mid-summer.

GREEN BEANS: Jo picked more and got them into the freezer.

YELLOW SQUASH AND ZUCCHINI: Mother Hubbard's cupboard was bare; ours is full of yellow squash and zucchini. Jo has tried freezing them in the past, but when thawed they are fall-apart mushy. She read somewhere online that they remain more firm if sliced and steam blanch instead of blanching in boiling water. She experimented with freezing a couple of pints using that method. We'll see.

CUCUMBERS: Production is far surpassing what I can eat. (Jo doesn't care for cucumbers.) Jo's intending to make some quickie pickles. We have quarts of regular canned pickles still left over from years past.

BED MULCHING: I've got three of the four fallow beds heavily mulched with grass clipping. I spread a layer of compost followed by a layer of manure. Then, I cover the beds with a layer of newspaper with the grass clipping on top. Our plan is that all we'll need to do next spring is pull back the mulch and plant. The possible flaw in this plan is: Armadillos. Armadillos love the bugs and earthworms that thrive under the mulch. If an armadillo discovers the beds and goes on a overnight feeding frenzy, the beds will look as if they've been tilled. Later in the fall, I can cover the beds with chicken wire we have for that purpose, but for now the beds have to stay uncovered so I can keep the weeds and especially Bermuda grass from growing into the beds from the aisles.

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Garden 2009: Garlic Planting

Garden 2009: Mulch

Contender bush beans mulched with grass clippings.

This week I got both the green bean and sweet potato beds mulched with grass clippings.  Mulch is essential to keep the moisture in and the weeds out.

Many experts recommend against using grass clippings for mulch.  I will willingly concede that grass clipping are far from the best mulch, they are what I've got, so I use them.

Grass clippings make poor mulch because:

• They compact and, therefore, break down slowly.  (True, but here in the south with our high temperatures and long growing season that's not a problem.  By fall even grass clipping mulch will need to be reapplied.)

• Grass clippings form a compact sheet that will shed rainfall.  (True, but we don't usually get a lot of summer rainfall anyway.  Drip irrigation hoses under the mulch provide water to our garden plants.)

• Grass clippings import weed seeds into the garden.  (True, but so do most affordable, organic mulching mediums -- like hay.  The trick is to keep the beds mulched all the time, a trick we almost never accomplish so we pull a lot of weeds until we can get the beds mulched again.)

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Garden 2009: Mulch